Over the past few months I’ve been able to “blog hop” every now and then and have noticed bloggers aren’t takin’ full advantage of their side bars to make a little income.You make be asking yourself, “What is an affiliate Program”? In short, it’s a arrangement made by you and a merchant(company). You’ll insert a link into a article that’ll take your reader to that said website. If the reader turns into a customer of the merchant you’ve just made yourself a certain percentage (that’ll all be in your “contract” upon sign up) aka Pay-per-sale or cost-per-sale. In the instance you are sending a reader to another site that doesn’t require an action these are called Pay-per-click or cost-per-click. These aren’t very popular so we will move onto Pay-per-lead or cost-per-lead. The CPL has become popular over the past few years. This requires the reader to take action by going to said merchants website and either signing up for a marketing campaign and more times than not, a newsletter.
Now not only are there text links but there are also banners (like you see on my side bar to the right). Banners are typically images that are already in HTML code and you’ll simply copy and paste where you’d like the image to appear. This can be done in a side bar, in a article, in your header, footer and everywhere in between! I love playing around with banners to see what works and what doesn’t….I actually find it interesting because things I think are going to have high click thru’s are in fact not and vice a versa.
Now for me, when I started I didn’t know where to start either. It was just great to know that I had people other than my family reading my deals! So here’s a few websites that you’ll want to join to make a little cash flow….it won’t be much, but, every little bit counts!
- LogicalMedia.com
- CJ.com
- Google Affiliate Network
- Linkshare
- Impact Radius
- Referred Media
- Amazon
- My Savings
- ShareASale
- Ebates
- Escalate Network
When you are starting out, put up different sized images and move things around until you know what works and what people wanna see. From there you can use Google Analytics (keeps track of visitors, page views, etc.) and every 3 months check to see what articles are popular. From there go place ads from your affiliates that are relevant to your article.
There’s so much to earning an income and operating a website, so take baby steps and learn how to optimize!
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